old shoes and picture postcards
by ittykat
Summary: A collection of drabble fills from the P/R drabble meme on LJ. Part 2 - Laundry Day
1. Who's on First?

**Who's on First**

"Out!" Mr Schuester cries when Mercedes swings and misses for the third time. Puck would feel sorry for the girls, so far their little social boys-vs-girls is skewed pretty heavily towards the boys so this team building exercise is probably a bit demoralising for them, but he can't really find it in him to care too much. So sue him! He liked winning, and it doesn't happen as often as it should, if you ask him.

Maybe it's not fair that he and Mike have been playing baseball together since Little League and Kurt dives for balls like they're Grammys. But the girls always seem to win these little team-building competitions, and as far as he's concerned they are due for win of their own. And it's not like they're completely helpless - pretty much the only lesbian stereotype that Santana actually fills is four years on the varsity softball team - and if anyone can scare talent into a bunch of wussy girls it's her.

But honestly, the next two batters up are Tina and Rachel and both of them look terrified at the prospect of having to face the pitcher's mound and actually attempt to hit something. Puck reckons they have this in the bag.

Tina steps up to the plate and squares off against her boyfriend. They share a cutesy smile (did he just think the word 'cutesy'? He cringes at himself for clearly leaving his nut-sack in his other pants) and Mike actually blows her a kiss before throwing the most weak-ass pitch Puck has seen him throw in years. Tina swings and hits it between Finn and Sam and she runs, managing to get all the way to first and Santana to second before Finn gets to the ball. The girls in the bleachers are cheering and clapping joyfully at their good luck.

"I hope that shit gets you laid tonight, bro," Puck yells darkly at Mike, not caring that everyone else can hear too. "Because that was weak and you totally betrayed your team for snatch."

Mike shrugs, and Puck tosses the ball back at his stupid smiling face. Unfortunately Mike catches it. Whatever. They'll still win. The bat they're sharing is almost bigger than Rachel anyway, and she's holding it like a musician would hold some sort flute or pipe- like it's something dainty and breakable and not something that could smash your eye socket into your brain stem if you're not careful where you swing it.

"'Sup Berry?" He says with a grin as she steps up to the plate.

"I'd appreciate it if you desisted trying to intimidate me. It won't work." She says with her usual confidence. Puck finds it admirable on some level, her dog-headed belief that she is always the best at everything. Pity she's wrong this time. He doesn't like the expression her face makes when she's disappointed.

"Who's intimidated?" He says lightly, but the grin doesn't leave his face.

Sure, he might not like her looking disappointed, but he likes winning more, so... priorities and all that.

She lifts the bat over her shoulder and swings experimentally once, twice, before stepping up to the plate.

"Come on, Rachel!" Tina yells from first.

"Don't suck!" Santana yells from second.

"I'll still like you if you suck." Puck says quietly to her, and she risks a sharp glance at him before turning back to Mike.

Mike draws his arm and throws the ball, harder this time than the one he sent at Tina, and Rachel swings and misses. Puck catches it easily between his gloves.

"Strike one!" Schuester calls.

"Strike one, Berry." He goads, then tosses the ball back to Mike.

"Shut up, Puckerman." she says and there will always be a special place in his heart for the wonderfully pissed off expression she has on her face right now.

"It's all right to suck at something, the world won't swallow you up because you're lacking in talent."

He can almost taste her stony silence.

"Let's keep it light, guys!" Schuester says, in a futile attempt to sever some of of the tension.

Rachel steps back up to the plate, gripping the bat more tightly this time. Mike pitches, she swings and...

The ball goes soaring across the field with a solid THWACK, high over the heads of Finn and Sam, and Kurt runs after it as fast as his skinny legs will take him. Rachel tosses aside the bat and sprints quickly from first to second, and the girls in the stand explode into raucous cheers and squeals. Santana and Tina both fly past him and by the time Kurt gets to the ball Rachel is rounding third base. She's barrelling towards him with that exact same scary-determined face she always has on when she has a prize in her sights. Kurt pelts the ball to him as hard as he can just as Rachel dives for the plate...

"SAFE!" Mr Schuester cries as Rachel careens straight into his chest, knocking him back into the dirt.

She's breathing heavily on top of his chest, and honestly Puck is a little bit speechless. And horny because she's rubbing right up against his-

"Where the eff did you pull that from?" He asks in disbelief, shifting her to the side as he realises that she's just sharked him and he never even noticed. She's clearly a lot better at that acting thing than she generally got credit for.

"My uncle played for the Cubs." She says, pushing herself off him with a devious grin. She pats him twice on the chest. "Haven't I mentioned that? I used to visit every summer."

Before he can reply the girls pull her into a group hug full of squeals and jumping and noisy high-pitched celebrations of their win, and Puck can't even bring himself to feel shitty that the guys lost because, you know what? If she's this good at baseball (and singing and dancing, and acting, clearly) then it isn't exactly a stretch for him to think she'd be good at like, everything.

He resolves to ask her out tomorrow.


	2. Do you have a dollar?

**Do you have a dollar?**

He sees her for the first time on a rainy Monday night at the beginning of July, a week after he's finally settled into his new apartment. His building doesn't have a laundry so he asked his neighbour for the address of the closest laundromat, started a collection of quarters in a little plaster bowl his sister gave him as a house-warming gift and walked the block and a half with his clothes hamper slung across his back and Fruit Ninja installed on his iPhone to keep him busy while he waits.

She's the only other one in there, sitting in a red plastic chair up against the side wall, engrossed in a paperback and whatever she has playing on her iPod. She's got shiny brown hair and pale olive skin and she only briefly glances up when he steps inside the brightly lit room and sets about filling two free machines with his dirty clothes.

So their first 'meeting' isn't particularly spectacular.

She's there the next Monday, and the Monday after, and each time walks in with his hamper slung across his shoulder, she spares him a glance before returning her attention to whatever she's brought to read- One week it's a magazine, and the next it's another paperback. He keeps to himself and goes about his washing without getting in her way.

The forth week is a bit different. He's nursing a second-day hangover after a big night out on Saturday night that seem to be morphing into the flu and wants nothing more than to be passed out on his couch with baseball on the TV and something greasy digesting in his stomach, but he needs a change of clothes for tomorrow and so he can't just shirk his responsibilities like he wants.

He resolves to just get everything out of the way quickly and maybe he can figure out a way to get comfortable enough in these red plastic chairs to squeeze out another nap before he has to drag his hamper home. But when he's shoved his clothes into his two regular machines and sticks his hand into his pocket for his quarters, he realises that he forgot to grab them on the way out.

He can't, he _can't_ walk all the way back to his apartment right now. He'd had to fight every instinct to pull himself off the couch to come down here in the first place. He just doesn't have it in him to do the trip all over again. He leans his head up against the green-painted laundry machine and groans a little in frustration.

"Are you alright?" A light voice calls from the other corner of the room. He twists his head a little to see the brunette laundry girl sitting in her regular chair. Damn. He'd been so hungover he hadn't even noticed her there.

"Yeah." He croaks, and if she didn't think he was pathetic before she's sure to think it now. "Bad day, s'all." He grumbles.

She slips a bookmark between the pages of her novel and sets it aside. "You don't look well." She says, eyes darting to focus on his bloodshot eyes, his sickly complexion and the vein throbbing in his temple.

"I'm hungover."

"That'll do it." She murmurs in agreement, nodding a little.

He closes his eyes and breathes in the lemony fresh, humid air of the room and then lets it out slowly, hoping that the zesty smell of the detergent and fabric softener would be enough to give him the energy to keep going... It's not.

"I wouldn't normally ask, but have you got any spare change?" He turns and asks, figuring the worst she can say is 'No'.

"Sure." She says cheerfully, standing up and pulling a small beaded coin purse from a hidden pocket in her dress. It tinkles brightly with change.

Finally. Something going right today. "You are a fucking angel." He says and lets out a long breath of relief. She laughs lightly and he gives her a gracious smile as she counts out enough change into his hand for his two machines and enough for him to use the dryer afterwards as well.

"I'm hardly an angel." She says with a wave. "But I do believe in paying it forward... Just do something nice for someone else this week and we'll call it even."

They feed the coins into his machines together and soon enough his laundry is rhythmically spinning around in front of him, making him all the more nauseous, but he's still stupidly happy he doesn't have to make another trip back to his apartment.

"Thanks...?" He trails off, hoping she'll give him her name as well as the spare coins for the dryer.

"Rachel." She says. "Rachel Berry."

"I'm Puck." He says, and she laughs again.

"Is that really your name?"

"It's a nickname... Everyone calls me it. Even my teachers did." She watches him for another moment or two, and lets the silence hang precariously between them for a few moments before he concedes: "Noah Puckerman"

"Well it's nice to meet you, Noah." She holds out her hand and he shakes it gratefully. She points a dainty finger at the red plastic chairs. "If you can get comfy on one of those chairs you can try and get a little bit of sleep. I'll watch your things."

He decides then that yeah, no matter what she says, she's definitely a gift from the hangover gods.

The next week he brings her a hot chocolate as a thank you. He even knows to get it with soy milk, and it's not completely creepy how he knows that without asking. It's just that he's noticed that sometimes she has a Starbucks coffee cup sitting on the ground next to her feet, and after years of working as a barista in college reading the scribbles on coffee cups is now just a bad habit he can't shake.

"You didn't have to do that!" She says, but takes the warm cup from him anyway and holds it close enough to her nose to smell the sweet milky goodness.

"But I wanted to. And I did what you said, Haley Joel Osment style." He says, and sets his hamper next to his feet. "My neighbour bought some stuff from Ikea and needed help putting it together."

She smiles again, and takes a sip of the warm hot chocolate.

They start talking more, after that. He learns she's an actress working on an off-Broadway play and does her laundry on Monday nights because that's the only night she's not performing on a stage for hundreds of people to enjoy. He learns they're the same age and both from Ohio, though not from the same part obviously. He learns she's Jewish too, by birth at least, but that she was raised by a gay couple and is understandably a little ambivalent towards organised religion in general.

He tells her things about himself as well. He tells her about how he only just moved to the city, and how he's working a crappy job riding a desk at a temp agency, but what he really wants to do is make it as a rockstar, and unlike his mother (and pretty much everyone else he tells that to) she doesn't laugh at him and tell him how futile his dream is. Instead she asks if she can hear something he's written, and he lets her listen to a couple of his songs on his phone. He tells her about his mother, and his little sister, and she introduces him to the wonder that is fabric softener, swearing that it will blow his mind.

Somehow Monday nights become the highlight of his week. Between the mediocrity of his working day and the disappointments that his nights can bring, she becomes somewhat of a bright spot of sunlight he can relax into one night a week. He becomes conscious of it when he catches himself thinking of things to tell her when he sees her next, and soon seeing her one day a week isn't enough because he has too many things to talk about and their one hour of shared time once a week just isn't cutting it any more.

So he buys a ticket to her show and watches from the balcony as she blows the entire theatre away. It's not a serious show, all about a high school glee club and their David Vs. Goliath battle to win a national show choir competition. She's not the lead, but she's definitely the most compelling character as far as he's concerned, and when she sings her solo he's stunned into silence like the rest of the theatre at just how _amazing_ she is.

He waits at the stage door after, nervous and with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket. He's not the only one out here, young women and a few excited gay men are clutching playbills and hovering as well, and as various actors and actresses exit one after another the crowd squeals and autographs are given, and photos taken and Puck wonders if it's like this every night, if this amazing Laundromat girl he's only known for a few months is actually A Big Deal, and he just never knew. Well. He's been starting to think she's a Big Deal, but definitely not in the way that this pulsating group of fanboys and girls seems to think.

Finally, she steps out, dressed in a little blue dress he's seen her fold a dozen times by now. It must be a favourite of hers, and it definitely looks good on her. She gives all her attention to the crowd around, posing happily for photographs and signing autographs, so it's a little while til she pushes through the crowd and sees him standing up against the side wall.

His stomach does a weird flip when the first thing she does upon seeing him is grin.

"Hey!" She says cheerfully. "You should've told me you were coming!"

He shrugs, "It was a spontaneous thing, figured I should see you in your natural habitat." He nods towards the fans who're now cloying around the male lead of the show. "I didn't expect all that."

"Oh." She blushes, and clutches at the arm of her bag nervously. "It's all still quite weird for me."

"You were amazing up there." He says, changing the topic, and they turn together to walk to the Subway station. They share a stop after all, living a block away from each other.

"Thank you!" She says with a grin "We had a great audience tonight and that can make all the difference. Did you enjoy it?"

"Sure." He says, finding her nervousness oddly endearing. Maybe it's a little strange, seeing her outside of the fluorescent light of the laundromat, walking together down the street, but at the same time it feels normal, and natural. After all, they've each seen each other's dirty laundry and they've been chatting together once a week for months now... It's about time he asks her out.

"Do you want to grab a drink?" He asks, looking down on her. "My treat."

"Sure!"

Six months later, he's finally getting some buzz and is in some pretty serious talks with some important people about a record deal. He also moves in with his girlfriend, and he loves that no matter how busy they are getting, now she's in workshops for a new musical (this one is _actually_ on Broadway) and he's actually kind of in demand, they still go to the laundromat every Monday night. Together.

* * *

><p><em>thanks for the reviews! Filling a prompt from the PuckRachel drabble meme on LJ "Laundry Day". Unbetaed, because my normal beta is off cavorting in Europe so please forgive any mistakes I didn't pick up!_

_If anyone has any requests for something they'd like to see I'm happy to give it a go :)_


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